I would not have been able to tell which buffalos were verbs, which were nouns and which were proper nouns without the rephrasing of the sentence on Wikipedia.

I would not have been able to tell which buffalos were verbs, which were nouns and which were proper nouns without the rephrasing of the sentence on Wikipedia. In fact even with that rephrasing I still find it difficult to tell which buffalo in the original sentence is what.